I am working on an integrative scoring system for Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) stories and other personal narratives. In order to move this project forward, I will need to work with a fairly large number of stories - preferably from various populations. I know there has been a good deal of research and clinical work using TAT-type measures and early memories. Does anybody know where to access the raw data from any of these projects? Obviously an on-line resource would be fabulous, but physical collections that can be accessed would be almost as good.
check on the work of George de Vos--he did cross cultural TATs.
Yes, thanks - I've been reading Volume 1 of his magnum opus, which presents his scoring system and is one of the sources I'm drawing on. Unfortunately he is deceased, and I don't know whether the raw data (TAT protocols) were preserved. Maybe I should contact his son, who co-authored the final set of books.
I took a class from him at the University of Hawaii in 1966, and we did TATs as part of our classwork. I will never forget the session where he hosted Margaret Mead in our seminar, and she scolded me for giving out too much info on my subject. A memorable experience!!
Hello!! I know that Pheobe Kramer is an important reference in TAT research and also Robert Holt has a Manual and score method.
In Argentina we have a long tradition in research with Projective Techniques. About narrative techniques we use TAT , CAT-A, SAT,and also Phillipson. I use the Phillipson and also teach it at the University.
As i work as a professor and have access to other colegues that work and reserch with TAT in Argentina, if you are interested I can contac yout whih them. Two oh them have publicated books about TAT ; their names are Susana Torres de Lugea , and Susana Russo. Maybe you can find articles.
bye!
Thank you, Susanna! Yes, I am familiar with Kramer's work and Holt's as well. Have both their scoring manuals. Holt's mainly targets the Rorschach but includes some TAT-related material. They are two of the dozen or so people whose work I hope to integrate into something more comprehensive.
I will look for articles by the people you mention. My principal need is for a trove of actual test protocols. Once I have a scoring system halfway developed, I will need to try it out, establish inter-rater reliability, some kind of tentative norms, etc.
Contact Dan McAdams in the psychology department at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
Stephen, did you find a source for TAT stories? Oliver Schultheiss and James Pennebaker have used the 8 images in the Picture Story Exercise, but I have not been able to locate a source for stories told to real TAT cards. Ryan Boyd and I are doing research on computer text analysis of story telling tasks using LIWC 2015, but I need TAT stories from a normal sample for comparison with clinical TAT stories from a practice research network.
We probably ought to collaborate! My colleagues and I have been collecting some stories - also using LIWC, as well as human-powered ratings. But the limitation here is that since the TAT stories are just one component of a multi-pronged study, we're only getting three stories per participant. Which obviously isn't going to do a lot for reliability!
It's a bit frustrating, isn't it, knowing that there must be troves of stories stashed away in boxes from all those studies conducted in the latter part of the 20th century? But most of the researchers are retired or close to it (deceased, in some cases), so I think a lot of that is lost.
Stephen, I certainly would be open to collaboration on our TAT studies which appear to be somewhat similar in overall scope. My key interest is in developing psychotherapy outcome predictors that do not rely upon client self-report nor upon time-intensive examiner scoring and interpretation, i.e., performance based tests. Please feel free to e-mail me back channel at [email protected]. Thanks!
Assuming a large number of TAT reports are available, a topic model allowing for the automated content analysis of texts could be used to extract textual features, which then could be used to predict psychotherapy outcomes.
This approach would still rely on
client self reports, but it would eliminate the need for manual scoring, which would be automatically performed via topic modeling procedures.
Color me interested!
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